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Event Description:
Patient: “I think you might have prejudice against people like me, and you don’t understand and don’t really care about people like me as much as you do understand and care about your other patients who are more like you.”
Therapist: “I do care about you and, even though we are different from each other in some respects, I believe I have understood a lot. Could it be that you might be experiencing me this way because of all you have been through?”
Every psychotherapist has had the experience of being experienced, by the people whom we are trying to help, in ways that are different from how we experience ourselves. Therapeutic dialogues across the borders of racial, ethnic, or other diversities can intensify this dynamic. It can be extremely difficult, for example, to have the subjective experience of feeling dedicated to and engaged with the patient but, in contrast, be experienced by the patient as detached or insufficiently caring. Or, similarly, we may have the challenging experience of having predominantly benevolent feelings as we strive to be of help, but being experienced, nevertheless as traumatic or malevolent. Often, as psychoanalytic psychotherapists or psychoanalysts, we rely on the concepts of projection and transference to emotionally protect ourselves and sustain us, as we attempt to survive the discomfort of feeling misrecognized and, even, make therapeutic use of such uncomfortable feelings for therapeutic effect.
This presentation offers an introduction to the presenter’s concept of “radical openness” as an alternative to a stance of emphasizing multicultural competence. Radical openness will be described as a stance which seeks to receive our patients’ strange experiences of us, across the borders of racial, ethnic or other differences, as if they are bound to contain personal truths and insights, for both them and us alike, even if we at first believe that they do not.
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